A. Technical Field
The present invention pertains generally to image processing, and relates more particularly to image and video resizing.
B. Background of the Invention
The diversity of display devices and viewing conditions today imposes new demands on digital media. An image or video source needs to be shown in different display screens (computers, cell phones or PDAs), where different sizes or aspect ratios are required. A video source may also need to be shown with a different runtime for different purposes, such as, for example, for video summarization or for video editing.
Current techniques are not adequate to meet the demands created by the diversity of display devices and view conditions. For example, standard image scaling is insufficient to meet these demands because such techniques are oblivious to the image content and typically can only be applied uniformly. Cropping is also limited because it only removes pixels from the image periphery. Concerning runtime editing, “fast-forwarding” and “slow-down” schemes condense or elongate a video temporally by extracting or duplicating every nth frame; however, the important events in the original video may be altered by such a content-neutral approach.